[Serious] Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds

[Angrboda]

Are they the same amount of evil or not?  You seem to be saying both yes and no.

Same act of moral import, which is evil - same evil.  The difference between necessary and uneccessary evil is that one is necessary and the other is not.  Just like it says on the tin.  I'm sure that we could find necessary evils which contain bigger bads than unneccessary ones and vv - but if we're comparing two apples, even for size, I'll call both apples. 

Pricking people with needles is pretty low priority, low evil, for any reason.  It's unclear why pricking a person with a needle for no reason would be wrong if pricking a person with a needle were not wrong.  If there was nothing wrong with it than pricking a person for any or no reason wouldn't be wrong in any case.  A few slaps on the wrist, maybe...and the same would be true for someone who's routinely shitty at vaccinating kids - but, as before..I'm a leniency over severity guy, myself.  I'd prefer to avoid compounding evil with further evil.  My kids prick each other with pins, and I think that's asshole behavior - but I'm not throwing them in the obliette for it, and I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that to a stranger either as a matter of moral principle (though, hey, I may fail, and shoot them dead in the moment - that sounds like something I might do).

I'm beginning to believe that you don't understand the concept of necessary harm. If something is necessary that means that it could not have been avoided, that no choice that I could have made would have prevented it. Most systems, moral realism or whatever, consider only acts for which we are responsible to have moral import, that one has to have control of or care for the events or things to be morally responsible. But if harm is necessary, I couldn't have caused any less harm, so why are you/they holding me morally accountable for them? It's like if I was driving my car and the brakes fail, causing me to hit and kill someone. In this 'system' of yours I would be guilty of murder, or manslaughter at least, yet my acts don't fit the definition. I said earlier that when you do specify the system you had in mind it would be unusual. Any system that holds people responsible for things they aren't responsible for is definitely unusual, and it's hard to reconcile it with reason. The reason the person who gave the shot for no reason is considered more immoral in most systems is that he could have avoided causing the harm. In this system of yours, both someone who could have avoided an event and a person who had no control over the event and could not have avoided it are both responsible for, or said to have control over the event. The only way to make that rational is to make us responsible for all bad events that happen, whether we could control them happening or not. But that would also make us responsible for the good events as well. So in your 'system' I saved 46 people from dying today. I didn't do anything to prevent them dying but something happened which did. Since I'm responsible for both the things I have control over as well as the things I don't have control over, I get the credit for saving those lives. Does that sound as stupid to you as it does to me?

If objective morality were easy or natural to a subjective agent, we probably wouldn't have to call it practicing at all.  I think that it's something that we can do, that can be done, that would take a rigorous application, and that would almost certainly dissatisfy or frustrate us - particularly with respect to any moral disagreement it may offer with things we currently assert to be true and valuable.  Our concern for the welfare of the unborn is many things, imo- among them, rational.  True.  Not everything we believe about that, however, is or even could be true.  What do you think?

The meaning of rational is also something that I'm beginning to think you don't understand. Something isn't rational simply because reason was involved somewhere along the way -- it must be rational top, bottom, and middle. Partially rational isn't rational. So the foundations of abortion reasoning have to be as rational as anything that comes after it. The unborn are like the born in some ways but unlike them in others, so it's a matter of judgement what rights carry over from the similarity and what rights do not carry over due to the dissimilarity. Pro-lifers want to suggest that all the rights of the born should carry over, that the differences aren't relevant. Are they right? They could be. Are they wrong? They could be. Is there an objective, rational answer to these questions? You say yes. So tell us, objectively and rationally what the answers to these questions are.